Expanding Emergent Bilingual Children's Biliteracy Engagement Through Multimodal Translanguaging Pedagogy in a Community-Based Korean Heritage Language Classroom

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines how a multimodal translanguaging pedagogy shaped emergent bilingual children's biliteracy engagement in a community-based Korean heritage language classroom. Although heritage language classrooms support language maintenance, monolingual expectations can limit children's use of the linguistic and semiotic resources they draw on in their bilingual lives. Responding to this tension, I designed and implemented a 10-module curriculum that integrated Korean language and cultural learning with multimodal meaning-making and flexible bilingual language use. Grounded in a translanguaging perspective on literacies and a sociocultural view of biliteracy, the study draws on classroom videos, children's artifacts, a teacher reflection journal, and parent questionnaire data. Findings show that multimodal task design expanded children's entry points into biliteracy participation by positioning drawing, talk, gesture, material construction, and bilingual text as legitimate literacy resources. Bilingual materials and teacher mediation fostered cross-linguistic awareness by inviting children to notice, compare, and explain relationships across Korean and English. Identity-centered tasks also repositioned the classroom as a translanguaging space where children represented their multilingual, cultural, and transnational lives. The findings contribute to translanguaging and biliteracy scholarship by showing how flexible language practices can be pedagogically organized and how biliteracy engagement can be understood as multimodal and bilingual meaning-making.